Creating a Simple Campaign

To open the Facebook Campaign Creator, go to Campaign Creator in the left-hand navigation menu and click the Facebook card. This opens the launcher in a full-screen dialog.

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The Three Panels

Left panel — Campaign tree. A tree structure showing your campaign hierarchy: Campaign → Ad Set → Ad. Click any level to navigate to its settings. Use the three-dot menu (⋯) on any item to duplicate, create new, or rename. Centre panel — Settings. This is where you configure everything for the currently selected level. The options mirror what you see in Facebook Ads Manager — campaign objective, budget, audience targeting, placements, creatives, and so on. Right panel — My Space & Variation Preview. Two tabs:

• My Space — contextual helpers that change based on which level you are on. At the campaign level you see saved templates. At the ad set level you see recently used targeting configurations you can apply with one click. At the ad level you see your most recently active ads that you can reuse.
• Variation Preview — a live counter showing how many campaigns, ad sets, and ads will be created based on your current configuration, including any groups and restructuring settings you have applied.

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The Three-Step Launch Flow

At the bottom of the screen, a progress bar shows the three main steps: 1. Create Campaign — configure the campaign, ad set, and ad settings. Upload your creatives and define any groups (multiple audiences, budgets, placements, etc.). At the very beginning of this step, you also define your campaign structure and ad set structure — deciding upfront how variations will be distributed across campaigns and ad sets. 2. Review Variations — a full-screen summary of everything that will be created. A header row of information cards shows totals (campaigns, ad sets, budgets, ads, headlines, descriptions). Below is the complete campaign tree — Campaign → Ad Set → Ad — with toggle switches to enable or disable individual variations and naming templates visible throughout. No restructuring is done here; that has been moved to Step 1. 3. Add Automation & Publish — attach automation rules to your campaigns before they go live, review the full campaign list, and click Publish.

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Starting From a Template

If you have previously saved a campaign template, you do not need to configure everything from scratch. At the campaign level, open the My Space tab on the right panel and click Apply Template next to the template you want to load. The entire structure — campaign settings, ad sets, ads, groups, restructuring settings, and automation assignments — loads instantly. From there, you typically only need to swap in new creatives, adjust a budget, or update the ad account. See Save Your Work as a Template & Reuse for details on creating and managing templates.

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The walkthrough below covers a straightforward campaign with one ad set and multiple ads — no groups, no restructuring. This is the foundation. All advanced features build on top of this base.

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Campaign Level

Click on the campaign in the left panel tree and configure the following:

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Campaign Budget

The Budget section at the campaign level has two modes: Budget Strategy — choose one:

• Campaign budget (Advantage+ Campaign Budget) — Facebook automatically distributes the total budget across your ad sets, allocating more to the best-performing ones. This is the recommended option for most use cases.
• Ad set budget — each ad set gets its own independent budget, which you configure individually at the ad set level. Use this when you need strict budget control per ad set.

Budget Variants — if Campaign budget is selected, the budget amount is set here via Budget Variants. Each group card represents a separate budget variation. Click + Add Budget within a group to add multiple budget amounts to the same group if needed. When you add more Budget groups (by clicking + next to the group cards), each group generates a separate campaign variation — one campaign per budget. Campaign Bid Strategy — controls how Facebook bids for your ads:

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Ad Set Level

Click on the Ad Set in the left panel tree and configure the following:

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Budget & Schedule

Budget — if you selected Ad set budget at the campaign level, the per-ad-set budget is configured here. If you selected Campaign budget (Advantage+), the budget section at the ad set level shows an informational note and is not editable — return to the campaign level to change it. Schedule: Ad Set spending limits — tick this checkbox to set a maximum and/or minimum amount Facebook can spend on this ad set over its lifetime, regardless of the campaign budget. Useful when using Advantage Campaign Budget and you want to protect or guarantee spend for specific ad sets.

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Audience Controls

The Audience Controls section defines who sees your ads. Each audience group card at the top represents a separate audience variation — add more groups by clicking +. Locations:

• Include — add countries, regions, cities, or postal codes. Use the Location Variant field to apply a location preset (e.g., “Worldwide, country_group” to target all countries at once) or search and select specific locations.
• Exclude — remove specific locations from your targeting. Useful for blocking countries where you are not set up to take orders, or removing existing customer locations from a prospecting campaign.

Age — drag the Age Variant slider to set your minimum and maximum target age (18–65+). Gender — select Male, Female, or All. Language — optionally restrict delivery to users whose Facebook language matches a specific language. Leave empty to target all languages. Target Custom Audiences — select previously created Custom Audiences from Facebook to include or exclude. Typical uses: retargeting website visitors, targeting existing customer lists, or excluding current customers from prospecting campaigns.

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Placements

Each placement group card represents a separate placement variation — add more groups with + to test different placement configurations against each other.

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Ad Level

Click on the ad in the left panel tree and configure the following:

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Identity

Each identity group card represents a separate Identity variation — add more groups with + to test running the same ads from different Pages or Instagram accounts. This is useful for agencies managing multiple brands, or for testing how audience perception varies by Page identity.

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Ad Creative

Ad Name and Format: Media — click + Add Media to open the media browser where you can:

• Browse existing creatives — TheOptimizer displays all images and videos from your active campaigns across all connected Facebook accounts. Sort by newest, oldest, highest spend, highest EPC, most used, or least used. Filter by Creative Library tags.
• Upload new media — click Upload to add new images or videos directly.
• Generate with AI — click ✨ Generate with AI to create new image variations using an AI prompt or example images. Useful for quickly producing creative variants without leaving the launcher.

Each uploaded image or video generates one ad. If you upload five images, five ads are created — the count updates immediately in the Variation Preview panel. Per-creative options:

• Enhance with AI — generate a new version of any image by providing a prompt or example images.
• Customize by Placement — assign a different image for specific placements (for example, a different crop for Instagram Stories). You can do this per image, or use Bulk Placement Customization at the bottom of the media section to apply placement overrides across all ads at once.

Ad copy: Destination:

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Apply to All Groups

When you are working with multiple Creative groups, you can push the content of any media, primary text, headline, or description field to every other group in one click. Click the three-dot menu (⋯) on any media item, text field, headline, or description and select Apply to All Groups. This copies that value into the same field across all other Creative groups — useful when you want all groups to start from the same base creative or copy and then make minor tweaks per group.

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Auto-Match Images by Filename to Placements

When you need different image crops for different placements (e.g., square for Feed, vertical for Stories, landscape for Right Column), you can have TheOptimizer assign them automatically based on the image filenames. Include the aspect ratio in each image’s filename before uploading: In the Select Images dialog, enable the Auto-match by filename toggle at the bottom. When you click Next, TheOptimizer automatically assigns each image to the matching placement column based on the ratio in its filename. The next screen (Edit Placements) shows the result: each placement column already has the matching image pre-assigned, with the matched filename shown under the placement name.

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Tagging Images from the Campaign Creator

You can tag uploaded images directly from the media browser inside the Campaign Creator — no need to go to the Creative Library first. After selecting the Uploaded Media tab in the Select Images dialog, click the # Add Tags button at the top right. Select the images you want to tag (or use “Select All”), choose your tags, and confirm. Tags are applied to the images in your Creative Library and will be available for filtering in future sessions.

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New Ad Formats: Catalog Ads and Flexible Ads

Two new ad format options are now available in the Ad Format selector. Catalog Ads — connects the ad directly to a Facebook Product Catalog. When selected, the media section is replaced with a catalog and segment selector — choose the catalog and the product set to use. The ad dynamically pulls images, names, and prices from your catalog. Flexible Ads — allows you to organise images into groups within a single ad creative. Each Creative group can contain a different set of images, and you can drag and drop images to reorder them within each group. This is useful when you want to test different image batches while keeping the same ad set structure.

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What Happens When You Upload Multiple Images

Every image or video you upload becomes a separate ad. If you upload 10 images, you get 10 ads. This is the simplest way to test multiple creatives — one ad per creative, all in the same ad set, sharing the same targeting and budget. The Variation Preview panel on the right updates in real time as you add media. Always check the totals before moving to the next step.

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Next: Generate Campaign Variations

Once your base campaign is configured, you can move to Generate Campaign Variations to multiply this structure into dozens or hundreds of campaigns using Groups, Restructuring, and Duplication.